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I'm still not feeling wholly better, but, having fulfilled my obligation, I am at least not trying to write in French.
Luis cornered me this morning and exacted promise that I will go to French Table next week, and that he will be taking attendance. And then it turned out that the rehearsal that I had been told started at 9:00 wasn't actually until 9:30. No Comment, but I could have had a whole extra half hour to drink my tea and read the paper.
I was reading Augustine the other day. Between Tacitus, Canterbury Tales, and The King's Two Bodies, I had been neglecting him of late. I probably shouldn't find his excursions into natural history as funny as I do, but, well, they are funny.
City of God,, Book XI, ch. 4
For who but God the Creator of all things has given to the flesh of the peacock its antiseptic property? This property, when I first heard of it, seemed to me incredible; but it happened at Carthage that a bird of this kind was cooked and served up to me, and, taking a suitable slice of flesh from its breast, I ordered it to be kept, and when it had been kept as many days as make any other flesh stinking, it was produced and set before me, and emitted no offensive smell. And after it had been laid by for thirty days and more, it was still in the same state; and a year after, the same still, except that it was a little more shrivelled, and drier.
Of course, the Aberdeen Bestiary corroborates this: "Its flesh is so hard that it hardly decays and it cannot easily be cooked." But where are they getting this from? If they cook and eat peacocks, well, not regularly, but on occasion, shouldn't someone have had a better idea of what the flesh was like. The most interesting thing is that Augustine claims to be speaking from experience. Assuming he isn't totally making it up, I suppose it might have had something to do with the way it was prepared. Or, as Carthage, I am guessing, is fairly dry, it might have quickly turned into Peacock jerky.
And this is clearly an early version of the "but how do it know" joke:
Who gave to straw such power to freeze that it preserves snow buried under it, and such power to warm that it ripens green fruit?
The diamond is a stone possessed by many among ourselves, especially by jewellers and lapidaries, and the stone is so hard that it can be wrought neither by iron nor fire, nor, they say, by anything at all except goat's blood.
Again -- isn't this something that would have been testable?
And then there is a very cool description of the wonderful properties of that strange object the magnet, which I am putting under a cut because it is rather long:
( when a diamond is laid near it, it does not lift iron )
Luis cornered me this morning and exacted promise that I will go to French Table next week, and that he will be taking attendance. And then it turned out that the rehearsal that I had been told started at 9:00 wasn't actually until 9:30. No Comment, but I could have had a whole extra half hour to drink my tea and read the paper.
I was reading Augustine the other day. Between Tacitus, Canterbury Tales, and The King's Two Bodies, I had been neglecting him of late. I probably shouldn't find his excursions into natural history as funny as I do, but, well, they are funny.
City of God,, Book XI, ch. 4
For who but God the Creator of all things has given to the flesh of the peacock its antiseptic property? This property, when I first heard of it, seemed to me incredible; but it happened at Carthage that a bird of this kind was cooked and served up to me, and, taking a suitable slice of flesh from its breast, I ordered it to be kept, and when it had been kept as many days as make any other flesh stinking, it was produced and set before me, and emitted no offensive smell. And after it had been laid by for thirty days and more, it was still in the same state; and a year after, the same still, except that it was a little more shrivelled, and drier.
Of course, the Aberdeen Bestiary corroborates this: "Its flesh is so hard that it hardly decays and it cannot easily be cooked." But where are they getting this from? If they cook and eat peacocks, well, not regularly, but on occasion, shouldn't someone have had a better idea of what the flesh was like. The most interesting thing is that Augustine claims to be speaking from experience. Assuming he isn't totally making it up, I suppose it might have had something to do with the way it was prepared. Or, as Carthage, I am guessing, is fairly dry, it might have quickly turned into Peacock jerky.
And this is clearly an early version of the "but how do it know" joke:
Who gave to straw such power to freeze that it preserves snow buried under it, and such power to warm that it ripens green fruit?
The diamond is a stone possessed by many among ourselves, especially by jewellers and lapidaries, and the stone is so hard that it can be wrought neither by iron nor fire, nor, they say, by anything at all except goat's blood.
Again -- isn't this something that would have been testable?
And then there is a very cool description of the wonderful properties of that strange object the magnet, which I am putting under a cut because it is rather long:
( when a diamond is laid near it, it does not lift iron )
